piracy

It's happened - The Pirate Bay is down today. Stockholm County Police Intellectual Property Crime National Coordinator Paul Pintér released a statement today about a "crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm." Pintér went on to say that "this is in connection with violations of copyright law." The crackdown coincided with the first loss of signal in several months for piracy and filesharing website The Pirate Bay. This site is down with its forum site, Suprbay.org as well as Bayimg and Pastebay. Several other torrent-friendly sites like Torrage, Istole tracker, EXTV, and Zoink are also down.

Following its recent changes to Search, Google has pulled a handful of piracy apps from the Play Store, citing violations of the company's Content Policy. The pulled apps are said to have offered optimized web experiences for using The Pirate Bay, and include the apps "The Pirate Bay Premium", "The Pirate Bay Proxy", "The Pirate Bay Mirror", and the "PirateApp". This is the latest Google effort to combat piracy and steer users towards legally obtained content.

While there have been plenty of arguments on both sides over the years, a recent survey by BitTorrent Inc. puts some real numbers to just how likely pirates are to actually pay for music and movies. The number of respondents is a little low to paint a general picture of all torrent users, but at least there's evidence that not everyone is a freeloader.

As you might recall, Kim Dotcom -- the subject of numerous legal battles and founder of file-hosting service Mega -- soft-launched his own single album Good Times back in January. It has been available through Mega for some time now, but began having troubles back in September when IFPI -- which represents many big-name music labels -- started hitting it with takedown requests over alleged copyright infringement. That had rolled out into a story of unknown pranksters and blindly sent takedown requests, and now months later Kim Dotcom has been banned from his own site for sharing his own album.

The MPAA has introduced a new website it hopes will steer you away from piracy by listing all the places (most of them, anyway) where you can get content legally. It's called WhereToWatch.com, and it recently launched in beta form with a clean interface and search functionality. Both TV shows and movies are listed, with content being presented alongside a summary and other relevant information, as well as links to services where it is offered -- and price tags -- listed beneath it.

Hot on the heels of Google's recent changes to reduce the appearance of torrent and piracy sites in search results comes news that Disney has obtained a patent for a search engine that is free of pirated content. Not just filtering out piracy from search results, Disney's patent focuses on promoting "authentic" sites, such as those of copyright and trademark holders, that are related to search terms.

Last Friday Google revealed its newest anti-piracy efforts, which largely amounted to a mixture of demoted rankings for torrent websites and a new box dangling legal download alternatives to those looking for content. It hasn't been quite a full week since the announcement, but the changes are in place and torrent websites are already hurting, with some of the biggest ones reporting massive decreases in traffic in the past handful of days -- though, it seems, some of the small sites are benefiting from the change.

Google has been active in helping combat the issue of piracy, and as such has tried various methods to deter users away from copyright-infringing sources to legitimate download websites. Last year Google published a report called "How Google Fights Piracy", which detailed the methods with which it was trifling and what users could expect as a result. That report has now been updated to encompass the changes that have taken place since its first publication, and among those changes is the addition of a large legit downloads suggestion box.

The battle over movie piracy just became a bit more transparent, with unsealed court documents revealing how Warner Bros. goes about finding infringing content and issuing takedown notices. The information was revealed as part of a lawsuit by file-hosting service Hotfile, which was a counter-suit issued during a legal debacle with the MPAA, something that ultimately resulted in a large settlement. The counter-suit resulted in redacted court filings hiding how Warner Bros. goes about finding pirated content, which attracted the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Upon request by the EFF, the case judge ruled that the records be unsealed.

The Netflix of Piracy is finally on the hallowed grounds of iOS. Well, sort of. Popcorn Time is indeed now available to be installed on iPhones and iPads but you will need a jailbroken device to do so, which is probably fitting given the murky legal waters that this streaming service sails through.